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3232CORNELL CLOSE-UPS | Hotel Professor Brings the World to His Classroom, Takes His Classroom to the Worldhttp://cornellsun.com/2017/04/25/cornell-close-ups-hotel-professor-brings-the-world-to-his-classroom-takes-his-classroom-to-the-world/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/04/25/cornell-close-ups-hotel-professor-brings-the-world-to-his-classroom-takes-his-classroom-to-the-world/#respondTue, 25 Apr 2017 04:10:37 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1421106Prof. Chekitan Dev, hotel administration, doesn’t like to just teach and research in Ithaca. He prefers to “engage in the world’s experiences.”

That preference is evident in Dev’s career path. Dev — named one of the top 25 most extraordinary minds in sales and marketing by the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International in 2009 — fills his office’s walls with more than 46 frames featuring photos of his work, spanning more than 75 U.S. and international companies over his 38-year career.

Outside of his teaching career, Dev is also a consultant who regularly travels abroad to advise U.S. and international companies. By mixing classroom service with real work in industry, Dev says he brings experiences to the hotel school that other professional schools lack.

“The problem in many professional schools is that you either have professors with just pure academic training or professors from the real world without any advanced academic training, so the former have trouble connecting their teaching to the real world and the latter end up telling a bunch of ‘war stories’ that don’t hang together with a good theory,” Dev said.

Dev told The Sun he has “engaged with the industry” at least once per week in his 29 years of teaching at Cornell. He called his industry experience “an essential part of his work” and said he works to “incorporate these experiences into his classroom teachings.”

Dev divides his work for these companies into four categories — teaching, consulting, speaking as a keynote at conferences and serving as an expert witness.

Under teaching, Dev holds workshops for company executives who are looking for ways to “improve their business practices and institute new changes to reflect changes in consumer trends.”

“I’m constantly connecting with business to make my classes current and relevant. In my case, if you’re teaching hotel management and you’re just stuck in Ithaca, it’s very hard to know what’s going on out in the field,” he said. “So when I go out into the field, I do two things — I go out to teach, but I also go out to learn about challenges and opportunities facing managers.”

Having served corporate, government, education, advisory, legal and private equity organizations in more than 40 countries and six continents, Dev has consulted companies like Disney, Hilton, Four Seasons Mumbai, Dolce Canada, Ritz Hotel Paris and many more.

“My relationship [with Disney] started when a senior Disney manager attended one of my sessions as part of our General Managers programs at Cornell came up to me after class and asked me to come talk to his team about what I had presented,” Dev said.

Dev said he helped Disney’s executive team brainstorm new ways to “essentially understand the big picture.”

“We talked about global trends in the hospitality industry and best practices and about what was going on — some of the new developments and changes that were happening, including new research — because Disney wanted to know what was new, what was interesting and how they could change their business model to reflect these new changes,” Dev said.

In addition to Disney, Dev has also worked for companies in Europe, including HOTUSA Spain, PlanHotels Italy and Zatisi Czech Republic, and in Asia, including Taj India, Imperial Delhi and YUM Malaysia.

“It’s amazing how common the problems are for these companies,” he said. “A lot of the businesses have very similar challenges, including how to get new customers, how to keep old customers, how to ensure that customers are happy and how to fight the competition.”

Dev said that Taj India asked him and two other Cornell professors — a finance professor and a human resources professor — to create a 10 day program for 40 Taj general managers in four different locations in India, including Mumbai, Pune, Lonavala and Chennai.

“At Taj, we brought our Cornell education to these general, senior and assistant managers through our executive education office,” he said. “So basically, we trained them on marketing, finance, strategy and how to manage and motivate employees.”

Companies also frequently fly Dev in to their respective headquarters to testify on their behalf as an expert witness, he said.

“If there is a legal dispute between companies and hotels, my role as an expert witness is to explain the subject matter to the court,” he said. “I once helped secure a $10 million-judgement for the owner of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Bali, Indonesia against its management.”

In addition to testifying, Dev has also worked for the Indian, Austrian, Jordanian, Jamaican and Aruban governments.

“In a lot of countries across the world, the government plays a major role in promoting tourism and hospitality,” he said. “For example, in Aruba, the Minister of Tourism sat in the front row, while I spoke at a conference on hospitality trends and offered my ideas on hospitality and tourism practices in their country.”

Dev calls his research, teaching and consulting “indispensable” to one another and said that he “would be bored to death” if he “did not do all three jobs.”

“Because I teach, I think I am a better consultant who can explain things clearly. Because I teach, I think I am a better researcher because I focus on asking questions to which my students want answers. Because I do research, I think I am a better teacher because I have something new and interesting to share in the classroom,” Dev said. “Because I do research, I think I am a better consultant, since I’m doing work that’s creating knowledge with impact and because I consult, I am both a better researcher and teacher, since I get to ask questions with both intellectual and pedagogical value.”

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/04/25/cornell-close-ups-hotel-professor-brings-the-world-to-his-classroom-takes-his-classroom-to-the-world/feed/0CORNELL CLOSE-UPS | Award-Winning Poet, Professor Captures ‘Spirit of Caribbean’http://cornellsun.com/2017/04/18/award-winning-poet-professor-captures-spirit-of-caribbean/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/04/18/award-winning-poet-professor-captures-spirit-of-caribbean/#commentsTue, 18 Apr 2017 04:30:13 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1388657As English Professor Ishion Hutchinson recounted his past, his voice carried what he called the “melody” of his home of Port Antonio, Jamaica.

“The spirit of Caribbean-ness and those kinds of things, they’re so intertwined in the psyche,” he said. “Yes, you suffer from this wound, this immense desire to want to be there, to be engaging with the physical landscape and so on and so forth — but those things are inside of you.”

“The sea is inside of me, the Blue Mountains would be my nose,” he laughed. “It’s really big.”

The story of the Caribbean is “still unfolding,” as Hutchinson put it — and he has played his own substantial role in shaping that story.

A poet by profession and by nature, Hutchinson’s most recent work, “House of Lords and Commons,” is something that Dan Chiasson of The New Yorker calls “timeless.”

The collection, which was published last September, has earned Hutchinson a National Book Critics Circle Award and, most recently, a Guggenheim Fellowship, which is awarded for “exceptionally creative ability in the arts.”

“I have nothing but gratitude,” he said about his recent successes. “As a poet, you’re coming from a space or place of intense privacy. And then it gets out that you’re a poet, and there’s a lot of fear and trembling. I have been fortunate with people who were encouraging.”

Michael Wenye Li / Sun Assistant Photography Editor

Prof. Ishion Hutchinson – recent recipient of the National Book Critics Award – discusses the value of poetry.

Hutchinson’s roots to poetry are embedded in his home, which he characterizes as having its own unique endurance.

“My specific awakening to poetry is tied to that belonging,” he said. “If you have had a childhood in the Caribbean — or anywhere, but speaking specifically about the Caribbean — you know you have been touched by all of history, from ancestral pasts that have been obscured, right into the very beginning of the modern world. So that nexus of past, history and the uncertainty, at times, of what will be is always, I think, in the bloodstream of a Caribbean person.”

Hutchinson grew up on the poetry of British Romantic poets, and he said that a particular high school teacher saw promise in his early poems and gave him exercises to do outside of class.

“I grew up with people who were illiterate, not because they chose to be, but because of circumstances,” he said. “These are people, too, who were very supportive of some random boy with a pencil and a notebook. And I feel that they responded to that image of a boy because they’re projecting a certain hope for a future wherein more boys and girls would be excited about running around like anthropologists trying to write down everything around them, owning things in their very language and speaking for themselves.”

The poet’s biggest inspiration, however, is the recently deceased Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott, who showed Hutchinson what it meant to write about home.

“[He] was a big surprise and revelation to me,” Hutchinson said. “A writer from the Caribbean who wrote the landscape in his wrist. Lots of his images were close to the ones I lived in, so there was an immediate recognition. That was thrilling to read and try to emulate.”

In his first year at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Hutchinson was to meet his idol and do a workshop with him after winning scholarship in Walcott’s name.

“I knew his work much better than I knew him, the man, but I also had occasions of talking with him,” he said. “Other workshop members and I met at, I believe it was the Hilton Hotel in Kingston, where he sat at the head of the table, and everybody else sat just terrified.”

After obtaining his undergraduate degree in English, Hutchinson embarked on a voyage to New York University, where he received his Masters of Fine Arts in what he considers a sort of “reverse colonization.”

“It’s a mixture of accidents and desperate last decisions that led me to an MFA,” he recalled. “I heard about it from a friend who said, ‘you could actually go to the States to study poetry,’ which sounded to me like the most alarming thing anyone could have said.”

Hutchinson taught at four universities — including the University of Utah, where he obtained his dual Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English — before settling in Ithaca. As a poet, Hutchinson said he strives to embody the spirit of his relations and home and to honor the support system behind him.

“There’s something very ennobling about being a writer, and it’s nothing to take for granted, especially when you’re from a place where the history has always been against you,” he said. “I want to, when I write, honor the spirit of the illiterate, kind people, like my grandmother, who is in the texture of the language.”

Hutchinson added that part of being a writer touches upon being a reader, and he strives to “appease the shadows” of the writers admires. To him, engaging poetry is an “electrifying” experience.

“Every day, every new poem, every other story is an opportunity to change your life,” he said. “For me, you can only touch your heart — I mean literally hold your chest — when a poem enters poetry. It is so powerful. It silences you and makes you remember your body.”

Poets are a “version of evangelists,” Hutchinson claimed — generators of experiences that do not simply “collapse” down the page, but exist in readers for generations to come.

“The poets that you love, they do something to the blood ratio,” he explained. “Certainly, what Emily Dickinson says is true, it takes the top of your head off. … It makes you want to go out and break shit. But you don’t have to go out, necessarily, you could break shit inside of you, and find ways of agitating on the level of making your language not co-opted by the machinery of real politic.”

To Hutchinson, poetry is a continuous process, and he strives to emulate that in his work and his teaching.

“It’s the ongoing, ever-burdensome — not just thinking with thoughts, but with feeling — about this desire of wanting to possess something so large,” he said. “I think about that a syllable at a time.”

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/04/18/award-winning-poet-professor-captures-spirit-of-caribbean/feed/1CORNELL CLOSE-UPS | Professor Shares Beauty of Math with Students Traumatized by Subjecthttp://cornellsun.com/2017/03/29/professor-shares-beauty-of-math-with-students-traumatized-by-subject/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/03/29/professor-shares-beauty-of-math-with-students-traumatized-by-subject/#commentsThu, 30 Mar 2017 03:47:23 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1291931Prof. Steven Strogatz, math, is leading the charge against students traumatized by mathematics through what he calls his “public communications” of the beauty of math in his TED Talks, in a New York Times series and in his passionate teaching.

“A lot of kids come out not only disliking math, but feeling traumatized by it,” he said. “It’s [a] shame that we so often manage to turn them off, I don’t know quite why it happens, but it does.”

Though Strogatz was admittedly not one of these students with such disdain for mathematics, it was the exhilaration of solving one challenging geometry proof in high school that sealed his math career.

To this day, he still remembers that fateful problem: prove that if two angle bisectors of a triangle have the same length, it’s an isosceles triangle.

“I just started thinking about it, and I couldn’t do it, and that freaked me out a little bit, because I could always do any math problem that any teacher asked if I just kept at it long enough,” he said. “In French class, they would be asking us to conjugate verbs, and I would be thinking about the angle bisectors.”

Furthermore, his teacher, Mr. Johnson, who first posed the problem to his entire precalculus class, had admitted that he himself did not know the solution.

“He was our most impressive math teacher at the school. He had a beard, he went to MIT, he just seemed like a cut above the other math teachers,” Strogatz said. “And so for Mr. Johnson to say that he didn’t know how to solve this triangle problem — I never heard a teacher say that, or admit something like that.”

These were the days before the internet, so the answer could not easily be researched. After about six months of pondering over the question, Strogatz finally figured it out and went over to Johnson’s house to show him his solution.

During an interview Strogatz pulled out his old high school math notebook, which included a note from 1974 that Mr. Johnson had written to the dean of Strogatz’s high school.

“I’ve been throwing out a difficult geometry theorem to classes and bright math students for 15 years and no one has proved it. Steve came up with a clear and relatively simple proof,” Johnson’s note read. “Congratulations, he has real talent.”

From that point, Strogatz began to draft and attempt to solve his own questions, leading him toward widespread recognition for his research.

On topics ranging from complex nonlinear dynamics to small world networks, Strogatz said that choosing a research topic is an “emotional thing” because of the commitment and sacrifice it requires.

“It’s another relationship that’s going to go on for years: you and your book,” he said. “You better really want to write that book. It’s hard, so I just have to feel some sort of fever to write something, like I just have to tell this certain story or I have to explain this.”

Currently, Strogatz is working on a book that aims to convey the story of calculus, because he feels that most people who have taken calculus do not fully understand its purpose nor its beauty.

“I see it as this fantastic two thousand year story of great creativity and struggle and drama and enormous scientific importance in changing the world in a lot of ways,” he said. “The kind of stuff I want to get across in the book [is] that calculus is not some pinheaded thing that’s just for the physicists and engineers, but is a big part of culture, and when you start to see that, it makes it more interesting.”

It was the publication of his very first book geared toward the general public, exploring how and why systems spontaneously synchronized, that opened up exciting new opportunities for Strogatz.

One “very nice, out-of-the-blue opportunity” for Strogatz was the chance to fly out to California to give a TED Talk presentation. He said that he had never even heard of the program since this was before it was popular on the internet.

“They had guys filming it and I didn’t really think much of it, and now it’s on YouTube or the web and lots of people have watched it, hundreds of thousands of people have watched it, and I wish I had prepared it better because I really was just improvising,” he said.

However, Strogatz said the most exciting thing he ever did in his public communication of math was writing a series for the New York Times over the course of 15 weeks in the summer of 2010.

In his Math 1300: Mathematical Explorations class, Strogatz tries to foster an appreciation for the subject by relating mathematical concepts to other fields that students might be interested in, such as politics or music.

“The goal [of the class] is not to teach a lot of hard math, but more to teach why anyone would love math, what’s beautiful about it or fun, which a lot of students have never had.”

Although personally very passionate about math, Strogatz admitted that he does not think knowing math is particularly useful or practically important for the average person.

“I don’t think it really matters that much if people don’t know math,” he said. “You can get through your life perfectly well without knowing much math.”

Instead, he believes people should learn math to better analyze what is going on in current events and be part of the conversation. It is enriching to human life in the same that Mozart’s musical works or Toni Morrison’s writings, Strogatz explained.

“I feel like that’s the point, that if I get someone to appreciate math who’s never going to use it, they’re now let in on the fun,” he said.

After spending his undergraduate years at Princeton and graduate school at Harvard, and then even teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Strogatz was pulled to Cornell where he has remained for 23 years.

“People here are just as smart and hard-working as those places, but we don’t have the egomaniacs you find at those places,” he said. “I just find it very refreshing, how humble and open and friendly everybody is, students and professors.”

Despite all his external success, Strogatz said what he really loves is being a teacher at Cornell.

“It’s been an interesting journey, but in my heart, my main thing is still to be a teacher here at Cornell, that’s what I really care about,” he said.

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/03/29/professor-shares-beauty-of-math-with-students-traumatized-by-subject/feed/2CORNELL CLOSE-UPS | From the Olympic Village to Cornell: Dining Director Brings Innovation to C.U.http://cornellsun.com/2017/03/16/cornell-close-ups-from-the-olympic-village-to-cornell-dining-director-brings-innovation-to-c-u/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/03/16/cornell-close-ups-from-the-olympic-village-to-cornell-dining-director-brings-innovation-to-c-u/#commentsThu, 16 Mar 2017 04:16:15 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1221001After living in eight different locations the past 13 years while working for the Olympics and Major League Baseball, Dustin Cutler — the new director of Cornell Dining — found himself yearning to return to his home in upstate New York.

“This was where I was born and raised, in Cortland, New York,” Cutler said. “Both of my parents worked at the University, but I never thought I’d have the opportunity to run a large scale food service operation in upstate New York.”

Before coming to Cornell, Cutler found a passion for the food and beverage services, a passion that carried him through multiple professions around the world. His professional career began in the 2004 Olympic villages in Athens.

“I was right out of college at that point in time, and I was the dining room supervisor,” Cutler said. “I oversaw the production as well as the managing of the staff, making sure they were working in the most efficient level, and monitoring our portion sizes, because we were feeding athletes.”

Four years later, Cutler found himself advancing quickly in his career at the 2008 Beijing Olympic village, where he served as the strategic planner.

“When I was in Beijing … I helped develop the business plans for the Olympic venues we were opening,” Cutler said. “That included sourcing products, recruitment, layout and design. These business plans were created for the opening and closing of the facilities within the Olympics.”

Always looking for opportunities to “continue to challenge [himself],” Cutler then jumped into a new role working for the sports and entertainment industry where he worked in various convention centers before moving on to the Atlanta Braves.

“I was in charge of the concessions in the stadium, all premium services, including all suites and catering,” Cutler said. “We also sold all the apparel in the stadium, and we cleaned the facilities as well.”

Despite the allure of his past international experiences, Cutler said he fell in love with working with students through higher education dining at the University of Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2015.

“I decided I wanted to give higher education a shot [at UNLV] and I fell in love with it,” Cutler said. “I loved interacting with students with and I loved the environment — it was a very familiar space for me.”

At UNLV, Cutler worked “very closely with the students with providing innovation on campus, designing new locations within our retail space,” and mentored a student in the hospitality industry.

“I was asked by the dean of the hospitality school if I would be willing to mentor one of his students and provide guidance through the hospitality industry and what that meant after leaving college,” Cutler said. “Because I’ve had a little bit of an exciting career, in my opinion … the dean felt that it was suitable to give a very in-depth description of coming out of college and of some of the best practices of elevating their career [in hospitality].”

Now, Cutler hopes to bring these practices to Cornell, especially through his close interactions with the Student Assembly dining committee.

“Engagement with the students is very important to me. I look forward to working with the dining committee, taking advantage of their thoughts and ideas, and to really build on our program here,” Cutler said. “The dining committee is truly the student voice and vehicle for change”

In fact, Cutler said he met with the committee three times last week alone. His primary focus will be to foster direct communications with the students, faculty and staff on campus regarding the dining facilities.

“What I would like to know is how I can provide responses to feedback in a more effective manner and also to figure out current trends through this type of feedback,” Cutler said. “How we get feedbacks right now is through email or a comment card, which is effective but I think it can sometimes be challenging on our end to respond and it also doesn’t give us the data that we need.”

Through this communication and cooperation, Cutler said he will be striving to implement “cutting-edge” innovations on campus. Just five weeks into his position here, Cutler is already formulating various long-term visions for Cornell Dining.

“I think it’s very important to be cutting edge and it’s important to continue to provide innovation,” Cutler said. “Does that look like consumer experience when they order off of their mobile device? Does that mean different types of services provided in retail locations? Does that mean a new fancy beverage we are rolling out?”

Cutler is also looking for novel ways to continue Cornell’s commitment to sustainability.

“We are currently looking at implementing reusable containers within our dining facilities, which means an individual could bring a container in so they wouldn’t have to use one our disposable products,” Cutler said. “When they come back, they could exchange it for a clean container.”

Above all, Cutler is excited to work with “extremely talented directors and managers, front line associates [and] talented culinarians” to bring Cornell Dining to the number one collegiate food and beverage services in the nation.

“My goal is to get us to number one and I feel that we have the tools and the team here to make that happen,” Cutler said.

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/03/16/cornell-close-ups-from-the-olympic-village-to-cornell-dining-director-brings-innovation-to-c-u/feed/2CORNELL CLOSE-UPS | Cook House Dean Fosters Out-of-Classroom Connectionshttp://cornellsun.com/2016/11/30/cornell-close-ups-cook-house-dean-fosters-out-of-classroom-connections/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2016/11/30/cornell-close-ups-cook-house-dean-fosters-out-of-classroom-connections/#respondThu, 01 Dec 2016 04:25:56 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=760982Students not able to go home for Thanksgiving have always been able to find a place at her table. Now in her first year as House Dean of Alice Cook House, Prof. Shorna Allred, natural resources, continues hosting students at her apartment, often accommodating up to 40 at a time.

After returning from sabbatical last semester, Allred said she and her family were looking to live in a vibrant community, where they could regularly interact with students outside of teaching.

“I’m really passionate about engaged learning for students and how important out-of-the-classroom experiences are for students,” she said, adding that she has tried to dedicate her career to creating those experiences for students. “This was another way for me to continue that passion of mine and continue engaging with students informally, outside of the classroom.”

However, Allred’s decision to live next to hundreds of undergraduates was not just for herself. She explained that it was a family decision, incorporating strong input from her husband and with a lot of thought as to how the change would affect her six-year-old son.

In the end, her family decided the move was the right choice, which Allred partially attributed to her and her husband’s southern upbringing.

“We thought it would be something positive, not only for me and my career, but also [my family] would gain a lot of value from talking to students and interacting with students,” she said.

After several months in the position, the Allred family has enjoyed being surrounded by a sea of undergraduate friends. In addition to interacting with “smart, ambitious, fun” and diverse students, she said her son has also gotten the chance to join in on campus activism.

The Friday after the election, Allred said she and her son participated in the walkout so “[her son] could see students having their voices heard.”

While other professors might not enjoy having a wall-thin barrier between themselves and their students, Allred said she takes advantage of the close proximity to further her relationships with students. However, this is not the only way she minimizes traditional obstacles.

In the Department of Natural Resources, Allred’s research combines humanities with hard sciences by examining how climate change affects different cultures, and the resiliency that different cultures display after major natural disasters.

Allred said working at Cornell — which was one of the first institutions to create a research unit focusing on social science aspects of the environment — is her dream job.

During her sabbatical, Allred said she and her family lived in Thailand, where she examined how catastrophic flooding impacted communities and how the role of organizations, such as the government, changed as a result — an interdisciplinary approach she said she views as increasingly important.

“We need more disciplines working together because the issues facing society today are complex, and they require the expertise of multiple disciplines working on them together,” she said.

Allred’s work in Southeast Asia did not stop there. She started the Global Citizenship and Sustainability Program several years ago to give students “community-based research experience in Southeast Asia.”

Through the program, Allred brings Cornellians to the region to learn research skills, as well as develop general leadership ability, including teamwork and engagement.

Allred pointed out that the program is “not just privileged students at Cornell going abroad,” but rather stresses an exchange and makes an effort to bring students from places such as Thailand to study at Cornell.

Allred’s work fits with one of her strong beliefs, that students have agency. She said she hopes students realize they have control over how they make a difference in the world.

“I study resiliency and I think it also applies to individuals,” she said. “I hope students see what it is to be a resilient individual, what it means to cope with adversity and defeat, but to do so in a way that you’re always learning from it.”

This belief, Allred said, has been especially strong in the wake of the election of Donald Trump.

“My faith is in the young leaders of tomorrow that can make the world a better place, but it’s not just about opposing the system, it’s about being the system,” she said. “You will be the leaders of tomorrow.”

“Without being too romantic, I believe the classroom is one space where real difficult conversation can take place,” Woubshet said.

At Harvard University, Woubshet said he originally planned on studying diplomacy, anticipating attending law school and eventually working for Amnesty International or the United Nations.

He explained that his early interest in politics was partially fueled by his childhood in Ethiopia. Living under a communist government for the first 13 years of his life made politics “part of our everyday diet,” he said.

However, the second semester of his junior year, Woubshet said he took “Literatures of New World Africa,” his first ever literature course and one that “blew his mind.”

“Ultimately, I think there are these moments where students — be it in a classroom, be it any experience during college — are totally redirected as to what they thought they would do,” he said.

Woubshet called the first day of his literature class his “inspiration,” reflecting on how the professor framed the course with one of Woubshet’s favorite songs.’

“The first day the professor played one of my favorite Bob Marley songs,” he said. “It’s ‘Babylon System’ from the Survival album, and then for the next 45 minutes, he talked about [the song] in a way that was totally inaccessible to me, using theory.”

Woubshet said he was inspired to learn how to talk about the things he loved with as much sophistication and depth as his professor demonstrated in the introductory lecture.

“The very idea that you can start … a literature course in an English department with a Bob Marley lyric and then expand and frame the course using that lyric — I thought that was so powerful,” he said.

Even though he shifted his focus from politics to literature, Woubshet maintains that his initial training in history and political science still influences the way he thinks about literature.

“Like how literature can intervene in a public sphere and talk about issues like AIDS and power relations, and I think literature can be a major conduit to think about these things,” he said.

In addition to teaching African American literature, Woubshet said he equips his students with ways to discuss race in American society, such as “how race intersects with other markers of identity like gender, sexuality and class.” “If a literature class can give [students] some way, without being prescriptive, without being polemical, to deal with pressing issues, at least they have a vocabulary, and they have a perspective to critically contend with these issues,” he said.

Woubshet said he advises students who pursue careers in medicine, law and public health policy, among many other diverse fields, citing critical thinking and analysis as important skills that help students succeed.

“The ways in which an English major has prepared [students] for all that they are doing now, that in itself to me is a testament that this is a major that is capacious, it’s expansive in terms of its reach,” he said.

Woubshet also highlighted the unique approach to learning he takes in a classroom setting.

“The sense that I have as a teacher is that I’m also a student in the classroom, and to be open to the insights that my students bring to the classroom, I think that gives a different orientation,” he said. “It’s another way of breaking down the hierarchy between the professor and the student — the idea that education is only one way — it’s breaking down that paradigm.”

By breaking down these barriers, Woubshet said he allows his classroom to be a place where contentious and difficult thoughts can be expressed, an interaction often made difficult in a public sphere.

“As we’re seeing in this political election … a public space where different clashing ideas can be critically analyzed,” he said. “You leave the classroom and the civility still remains. That’s a rare thing.”

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2016/11/17/cornell-close-ups-english-prof-facilitates-civil-debates-on-contentious-issues/feed/0CORNELL CLOSE-UPS | Prof. Encourages Intellectual Curiosity, Mindfulness Through Meditationhttp://cornellsun.com/2016/11/10/cornell-close-ups-prof-encourages-intellectual-curiosity-mindfulness-through-meditation/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2016/11/10/cornell-close-ups-prof-encourages-intellectual-curiosity-mindfulness-through-meditation/#respondThu, 10 Nov 2016 05:58:28 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=700342Prof. Jane-Marie Law, Asian, Near Eastern, and religious studies stays busy teaching Introduction to Japan, operating a sustainable farm and taking a group of students to Japan every summer, yet still finds time to meditate.

Law encourages her students to explore subject matter through movies, theatre and art viewings and helps her students to interact with class material by sharing personal stories.

“What I’ve discovered is that what people really want to hear is other people’s stories,” she said. “They don’t really want to hear other people’s truths. [That’s why] I never talk about something that I don’t really care about.”

In addition to her course material, Law has strong feelings on the education system, which she believes confines students’ curiosity rather than encouraging imagination.

“We have students coming in that have been so intellectually careful — they’re timid, they want things spelled out,” she said.

Law explained that she completely revamps her course every year to make sure every class’ experience is unique. She said she wants to expose students to material they may not encounter in their daily lives, to further develop their individual intellects.

The professor said she also emphasizes self-acceptance and mindfulness in both the classroom and her personal life.

“You can only do what you can do in the present. And that has to be good enough.” — Prof. Jane-Marie Law

“Meditation gives you permission to be just good enough,” she said. “I don’t stress myself out being a perfectionist, because when you just be here now, you realize that the only thing that you can do in the present is very limited. You can only do what you can do in the present. And that has to be good enough.”

She extends this approach to many aspects of her life, including her appreciation and creation of art — as a practitioner of “cultivation in action,” Law believes that aesthetic training is closely linked to self-realization.

“The physical training that you put your body through kind of presents an opportunity for seeing the true nature of reality and cultivating the depth of a person,” she said. “It was very interesting to me later, as I got to know more about Japanese aesthetics, to understand that the art form I’m best at — which is dressage — is actually tied into Japanese aesthetics.”

Every year, Law takes her “Zen Buddhism” class on a trip to Japan where students live in a monastery for two weeks during the summer. She said students are always surprised by the experience of living in a temple, secluded from society and meditating daily.

“On day seven [of the trip], everybody just kind of hit[s] this wall,” she said. “Imagine hitting a brick wall and sort of sliding down … and what hit the wall was that they had been spending a lot more time being quiet and not having to invent a personality the whole time.”

When students come to her “falling apart,” Law said she tells them to “lower your standards.”

“Regard the ages between 18 and 22 as a time when you should learn some self-care,” she said. “Take care of yourself.”

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2016/11/10/cornell-close-ups-prof-encourages-intellectual-curiosity-mindfulness-through-meditation/feed/0CORNELL CLOSE UPS | Ken Bolton Recounts Path From Air Traffic Controller to Librarianhttp://cornellsun.com/2016/10/20/cornell-close-ups-ken-bolton-recounts-path-from-air-traffic-controller-to-librarian/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2016/10/20/cornell-close-ups-ken-bolton-recounts-path-from-air-traffic-controller-to-librarian/#respondThu, 20 Oct 2016 04:08:15 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=643610After years of directing airplanes down a runway, Ken Bolton now leads Cornellians to research resources. A self-described “human search engine,” Bolton says his work as a librarian has been revolutionized by the internet age.

Bolton said the dynamic work he conducts every day as a librarian is very different from the regimented and repetitive job he performed before arriving at Cornell.

“A lot of people envision [being an air traffic controller] as being stressful, and sometimes it was,” he said. “But 90 percent of the time, it was very regimented. You had to do everything following a certain protocol, certain standards. Until a big electrical problem or a big thunderstorm rolls in, then it gets crazy.”

Other than those few moments of variation, Bolton said that “most of the day was sitting at a radar screen directing airplanes. It just didn’t feel like something I wanted to do forever.”

After those five years, Bolton made a monumental move from California to upstate New York, completely changing the direction of his career. While his wife attended Cornell, Bolton said he worked on obtaining his Master’s degree in library and information science from Syracuse University.

Now in his current role, Bolton said he does “a little bit of everything,” including working as a librarian, teacher, negotiator with publishers and a marketing team for the library.

As he moved from air traffic controller to a librarian, Bolton said he was able to translate his skills of multitasking and accuracy to new challenges — although of course there were different risks involved.

Bolton calls changes in technology the primary factor driving the dynamic nature of his job in the library, where, he says, “everyday is different” and multitasking is essential.

While many students see librarians as someone “sitting at a reference desk waiting for someone to come ask them a question,” today librarians have to be be far more proactive, a quality Bolton considers imperative to the profession.

Fewer and fewer students are seeking assistance from the library in this traditional format because they “don’t think they need help or maybe, they don’t realize they need help,” Bolton said.

“If you just leave it up to students to do [it] on their own, they’ll just do what they can,” he said. “Anybody with a phone can find information. Librarians can help with the next steps — evaluating, applying, and protecting the integrity of that information.”

Bolton said students often struggle to find enough credible sources for their papers and projects, using only the information they find in the first page of a Google search. This makes it Bolton’s job to become what he refers to as a “human search engine.”

“Only about five percent of the information on the Internet is actually available through a free tool like Google,” Bolton said. “Most of the information out there is somehow protected behind a firewall or some kind of registration process. This usually comes as a surprise to students.”

To combat this problem, Bolton said he designed an entire course to help students find that other 95 percent of sources. This decision was additionally a response faculty members’ disappointment with the caliber of students’ research skills.

Bolton pointed out that 15 years ago, everyone was a consumer of information that was created by some other authority. Therefore, in a world where students are both information-consumers and information-producers, sifting through research to find credible sources can be a cumbersome task.

“Mostly through social media, all of us are now producing information — with blogs, websites, Facebook posts, tweets, those kind of things,” Bolton said.

The proliferation of information available on the internet has made it increasingly difficult to determine the credibility of authoritative sources, the librarian said.

Bolton said his course was “an effort to help the students get through all the junk that’s out there in the information landscape and get to the good stuff that they need to help with their assignments to help with their career research as well.”

From his various roles and unexpected career path, Bolton says his openness to change — both in his career and his life — led him to take on the dynamic role he has today.

“Looking back at it now, it worked out great,” he said of this unconventional path.

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2016/10/20/cornell-close-ups-ken-bolton-recounts-path-from-air-traffic-controller-to-librarian/feed/0CORNELL CLOSE-UPS | Library Analyst Describes Dual Passion for Research, Archaeologyhttp://cornellsun.com/2016/10/05/cornell-close-ups-library-analyst-describes-dual-passion-for-research-archaeology/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2016/10/05/cornell-close-ups-library-analyst-describes-dual-passion-for-research-archaeology/#commentsThu, 06 Oct 2016 02:53:49 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=606786When she is not working in a secluded Ithaca library, Gabriela Castro Gessner, a library assessment analyst travels many parts of the world, and the world of thousands of years ago.

“My anthropology degree and my job at the library have been a happy union,” she said. “I can apply my anthropological training and methods to my current job and it’s been incredibly rewarding.”

After earning her Ph.D. in anthropology, Castro Gessner worked to become a prehistoric anthropological archaeologist, studying events that predated writing — particularly in the ancient near east.

Castro Gessner emphasized that the plethora of travel opportunities has been one of the most enjoyable aspects of work as an anthropologist. Additionally, while excavating sites for prolonged periods, Castro Gessner said she was able to form relationships with people living in the areas she was studying.

“While on a dig, you have the opportunity to visit their homes and meet their families,” she said. “I really love that. It reminds me that there is another world out there that is not like here.”

Her recent research has focused primarily on documenting and analyzing pottery fragments from ancient Turkish communities.

“We find sherds of pottery and dishes that people used,” she said. “From these sherds, you can piece together a whole culture, and make a connection with a kind of people that lived thousands of years ago. I think that is a really special, surreal part of what it means to be an archaeologist.”

Castro Gessner said one reason she finds anthropological archaeology so compelling is because much of what she does is analogous to solving a puzzle.

“It doesn’t make sense when you’re just collecting bags and bags of material, but it all comes together at the end,” she said. “You start by gathering clues, and you put it all together. One piece is not going to tell you a lot, you need to put the whole thing in context.”

Many of the skills Castro Gessner has acquired throughout her years in the field, conducting studies and publishing papers, she says have also been applicable to her job at the library.

“You put together a broader picture from lots of sources of evidence,” she said. “This kind of holistic approach is a skill that I have used in my job in the library and in really all other aspects of my life.”

Although Castro Gessner has been happily juggling two professions, she emphasized that pursuing these two distinct passions was never her plan.

“I don’t think that I intended to pursue two careers,” she said. “I think it just fell into place. If you had told me 20 years ago that this is what I would be doing, I would have said that’s impossible. I think some things occur by happenstance.”

Hoping her experience with determining a profession help young people confused about their future path in life, Castro Gessner advised undecided students to “do what you love.”

“If there is no clear job description that comes with your major, maybe there is an aspect of your studies that will help you to find something that you really want to do,” she said. “Enjoy what you’re learning and enjoy being a student.”

Castro Gessner explained that her desire to work in anthropology stemmed, in part, from a fascination with people.

“I am very interested in people,” she said. “I think that there is a broader sense that we are all connected in some way. We might have different cultures and different ways of doing things but we’re really all the same human race.”

Castro Gessner acknowledged that, while it is not always easy to ignore external factors pressuring people to pursue more “practical” careers, it is important to make an effort to follow your interests.

“There was no direct path to where I am now,” she said. “It just happened organically and I think it’s because in some ways, I’ve always stayed true to my passions.”

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2016/10/05/cornell-close-ups-library-analyst-describes-dual-passion-for-research-archaeology/feed/1CORNELL CLOSE-UPS | Teaching Support Specialist Draws on Experience as Adult Transferhttp://cornellsun.com/2016/09/29/cornell-close-ups-teaching-support-specialist-draws-on-experience-as-adult-transfer/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2016/09/29/cornell-close-ups-teaching-support-specialist-draws-on-experience-as-adult-transfer/#commentsThu, 29 Sep 2016 04:16:33 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=588956Teaching Support Specialist David Hartino is especially equipped to make students’ Cornell engineering experiences applicable to the non-academic world; he lived there for decades before reentering the College of Engineering at age 40.

“My classmates really didn’t care that I was twice their age,” Hartino said of his reintroduction to college life. “I got into study groups, I was really welcomed in, and that says an awful lot.”

Hartino briefly attended the University of Buffalo after high school, before leaving to “find my way in the world, because I knew everything then, obviously,” as he said sarcastically.

He said he ended up spending over 20 years in the workforce before completing his college degree.

“I tried restaurant work, then I got a job on a construction site and I was a laborer — carrying cinder blocks up scaffolding, hauling lumber,” he said. “It doesn’t take long to figure out you better learn something, you better get yourself an education in some manner.”

Hartino said he remained ambitious, emphasizing the importance of being “hungry.”

“If you work hard and you take responsibility for your actions, you can be promoted,” he said.

Hartino said he knew construction work was “limiting” and ended up going back to school at Monroe Community College at the age of 38. He went on to graduate from Cornell with an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering and earned a masters in engineering in 2015.

“I was so far behind that I couldn’t even matriculate into a community college’s engineering program,” he said. “My math wasn’t up to snuff, and that’s pretty humbling right there.”

A Rochester native, Hartino said he was familiar with Ithaca long before he joined the Cornell community.

“When I was younger [my family and I] would come here for vacations — we would go camping, canoeing and hiking,” he said. “So to actually end up here in Ithaca is kind of where I wanted to be anyway, strangely enough, although I didn’t plan it to happen that way.”

Hartino said he had always leaned toward engineering, beginning with his very first stint in college. He explained he just “had to be ready” to pursue the career with commitment.

“I thought I was way too old to start an engineering career, but I guess not, because it’s worked out pretty well,” he said.

Hartino said he was able to attend Cornell because of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which encourages students from state schools and community colleges to apply to selective universities.

“Just because you’re at a state school doesn’t mean you’re not smart, you just have to understand the opportunities that are there,” he said.

Coming to Cornell was a “tough transition,” Hartino said, but “the attitude of the faculty and the student body here was really not one of elite snobbery; it was ‘Come on in the water’s fine.’”

Hartino also praised the variety of student backgrounds present at the University.

“I was the diversity,” he said. “I was the old man. And I think I brought something to it, but I also learned an awful lot from it. I wasn’t the only one with a story. Very often my classmates were like ‘you wouldn’t believe how I got here’ and I thought ‘try me.’”

Hartino said he developed a stronger motive to succeed while studying at Cornell.

“I spent 20 years on a construction site so I know what happens if you don’t do well, and you can do as well as you want here,” he said. “Everyone has a plan for success and everyone is really motivated here, and you can’t not get caught up in that.”

Hartino currently works as a teaching support specialist, finding fulfillment as a part of the faculty that helped him when he was a student, not too long ago.

He explained that his teaching style is “very unusual in a theoretical based program.”

“Especially in mechanical engineering, sometimes people forget that there’s things that move, and if you open up the hood of your car, there’s an engine in there with gears and grease and cogs and crankshafts,” he explained. “Everything we do here is a homework assignment: you turn it in at midnight even if number five isn’t quite done yet, but in the real world things have to work.”

Hartino said he integrates his practical background into his teaching methods, recognizing when to move on from purely theoretical outlooks.

“I challenge the students every day in every lab exercise to take a look at what we’re learning theoretically and what it means to them in the real world,” he said. “Instead of answering a question, I will ask you 25 more questions to get you to figure the answer out yourself.”

Hartino said he advocates keeping life in perspective and knowing that the department has the students’ best interests at heart.

“Maybe they knocked the ceiling down in your lab two hours before class started and you’re really having a rough time,” he said, referring to his own experience amongst the construction on the engineering quad. “But even if someone growls at you, you should know that for the people in this department, there’s nothing they won’t do for the students.”

Hartino added that being immersed in academia “keeps you young” and “keeps you open for new things and keeps you growing.”

“When you’re the superintendent on a job site you become old fast,” he said. “Here, everyone’s 20 years old and there’s this energy and embracing of everything that is new and is moving, and if you embrace that, then it keeps you young.”